open source marketer and community manager

Month: June 2010

Reading this made me think that my piece about the limitations of email at work is overdue. In Breaking the Email Addiction author Tony Schwartz argues that email distracts people from life (work and everything else) and must be cured as you would cure an addiction.

We’re pulled to anything that provides instant gratification, even when we know we’d get a bigger reward for delaying. We’re also quick to respond to any excuse to stop working on something that is difficult and requires high concentration.

That all seems correct. My argument for less email at work focuses on discovering of information within the corporation. Now I only need to cure myself from the email addition and finish writing my piece 🙂

I’m glad that Jorg Janke shared his experience of developing a commercial open source business with Compiere because you learn from failures as well as success. His long piece has some interesting parts, but what caught my attention most is the various experiments in the sales and revenue model. Janke says

Compiere certainly did not fail due to its technology. It failed due to lack of sales and marketing expertise, execution and the wrong bet to “upgrade” open source minded partners and customers to a traditional, commercial model.

Compiere’s experience shows that it’s very difficult to change the terms of an existing relationship with your community, developers/contributors and channel. It’s not enough to balance proprietary and open source components but you also need to keep the whole ecosystem happy while doing so. You need to make sure your community feels your love: that’s what Compiere failed to do.

The declaration from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg resonates very well in me:

“Email is probably going away,” she said.

Not only email should go away: I hope it will die! 🙂 There are so many better ways to share documents, decide where to go for lunch, update your friends on your latest achievements. The problem is convincing your friends and family and colleagues and the rest of the world to change habits, ditch email and use blogs, wikis, twitter-like tools (like statusnet) …This is the real issue, although it seems new generations have already switched to other tools.

I’ll blog more about limiting email in the enterprise using as an example a pet project I’m running at Funambol. Stay tuned.

The campaign to free the digital world from Digital Restrictions Management just got a new sticker. The old one is on my laptop’s screen represents the famous iPod silhouettes with white wires acting as shackles. It was a simple and powerful design. The new one is a the famous 1984 Apple ad, but I’m not sure its message is as clear as before. It also seems to give a sense of ‘victory’ for Apple fans: they now rule the digital world –with shackles, ok, but still winning.

Is it just me or you also think that you’ll have to explain the new sticker to your non-geek friends?

Joining a community not only makes you feel better but can land you a great job. Janet Swisher has been contributing to the online community FLOSS Manuals writing documentation for free/libre software. In a message to the community she wrote:

I hadn’t been looking for a new job, but I was contacted by someone at Mozilla about a position they had open. […]
I think it’s fair to say that being involved in FLOSS Manuals helped me get a job at Mozilla.

I’ve seen this happening often at Funambol where many of the people active in the community have been hired. Whether you’re actively looking for a job or not, its a good investment for your future to make your passion visible.